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Ephesians 2:19–21
“You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (vv. 19–20).
Having considered three of the four attributes of the church given to us in the Nicene Creed, we will today look at the last of these qualities. We are referring to the creedal attribute of Apostolicity—the church is one, holy, catholic, and Apostolic.
Fundamentally, for the church to be Apostolic means that it stands on the foundation of the Apostles’ teaching. In the ancient world, an apostle was one sent by an authority to represent and speak on behalf of that authority. The apostle of an emperor, for example, represented the emperor in such a way that the apostle’s words were to be regarded as the emperor’s words. Hearing the apostle was as good as hearing the emperor. With that background in view, we must understand that the Apostles of Jesus speak on His authority and give us His words. In following their teachings, we follow the teachings of our Lord and Savior.
Jesus commissioned His Apostles to proclaim the history of His ministry, life, death, and resurrection and to deliver the authoritative interpretation of these events under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (John 16:12–15). Without their teaching, we do not have Christianity, let alone any visible church. They are the foundation without which the faith does not and cannot stand, as we see in Ephesians 2:19–21. Commenting on these verses, Matthew Henry notes that “the church is compared to a building. The apostles and prophets are the foundation of that building. They may be so called in a secondary sense, Christ himself being the primary foundation; but we are rather to understand it of the doctrine delivered by the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New.”
Among the most important truths recovered during the Protestant Reformation was the true meaning of the church’s Apostolicity. The medieval Roman church saw the Apostolic nature of the church fundamentally as a visible succession of bishops who could trace their ordination via the laying on of hands back to the Apostles. The modern Roman Catholic Church continues to hold such a view. Certainly, we do not want to discount the importance of knowing the ordination succession of our pastors and elders, but Apostolicity cannot be established there. An “unbroken” chain of succession that goes back centuries is no good if the church leaders of today are not teaching what the Apostles taught. The church maintains its Apostolicity only as it is faithful to the Scriptures.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
The measure of a church’s claim to Apostolicity is its faithfulness to the Word of God. The Scriptures are the only place today where we find the teachings of the prophets and the Apostles, so faithfulness to them is the only measure of whether a particular church is truly Apostolic. A church’s doctrine does not have to be perfect for it to be Apostolic, but it must be true to the fundamental teachings on God and salvation found in Scripture.
For further study
- Deuteronomy 18:15
- Revelation 21:9–14
The bible in a year
- Jeremiah 46–48
- Hebrews 5
- Jeremiah 49–52
- Hebrews 6–7